Marilyn Ferris Motz

Harold E. Hinds

Angela M. S. Nelson

Since its birth in the 1960s, the study of popular culture has come a long way in defining its object, its purpose, and its place in academe. Emerging along the margins of a scholarly establishment that initially dismissed anything popular as unworthy of serious study-trivial, formulaic, easily digestible, escapist-early practitioners of the discipline stubbornly set about creating the theoretical and methodological framework upon which a deeper understanding could be founded. Through seminal essays that document the maturation of the field as it gradually made headway toward legitimacy, Popular Culture Theory and Methodology provides students of popular culture with both the historical context and the critical apparatus required for further growth. For all its progress, the study of popular culture remains a site of healthy questioning. What exactly is popular culture? How should it be studied? What forces come together in producing, disseminating, and consuming it? Is it always conformist, or has it the power to subvert, refashion, resist, and destabilize the status quo? How does it differ from folk culture, mass culture, commercial culture? Is the line between "high" and "low" merely arbitrary? Do the popular arts have a distinctive aesthetics? This collection offers a wide range of responses to these and similar questions. Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, Popular Culture Theory and Methodology charts some of the key turning points in the "culture wars" and leads us through the central debates in this fast developing discipline. Authors of the more than two dozen studies, several of which are newly published here include John Cawelti, Russel B. Nye, Ray B. Browne, Fred E. H. Schroeder, John Fiske, Lawrence Mintz, David Feldman, Roger Rollin, Harold Schechter, S. Elizabeth Bird, and Harold E. Hinds, Jr. A valuable bibliography completes the volume.

A Basic Introduction

Popular Culture Theory and Methodology

Pat Browne

The transformation of a house into a home has been in our culture a traditional task of women. The articles examine this process as they reflected the role of American middle-class women as homemakers in the years 1840–1940.

Middle-class Women & Domestic Material Culture, 1840-1940

Making the American Home

"Home and family," for a woman of the nineteenth century, represented a sphere much broader than the term implies today. A woman's duties as sister and daughter continued, basically unchanged, even after she had assumed the roles of wife and mother. This created a female-centered kin network which went far beyond the fragile nuclear family, and which insured lifelong security in what men and women viewed as an essentially hostile world. The female family is vividly portrayed in True Sisterhood, where Marilyn Ferris Motz examines the lives of white Protestant native-born American women living in Michigan between 1820 and 1920 and the kinship networks to which they belonged--networks that often extended east to New England and the Middle Atlantic states and westward as far as California. The University of Michigan's Bentley Library collections of the correspondence, diaries, photographs, and other documents of numerous family groups have provided the primary resources for this study of thirty extended families. Focusing on personal interaction within the family, Motz shows women playing an active role that is not suggested by observation of residence patterns, household composition, or legal distribution of authority. The book reveals women's use of language to maintain personal relationships, to persuade and manipulate, and to obtain support. Thus the power base of the woman, her informal networks based on personal interaction, persuasion, and sense of obligation, become visible. True Sisterhood shows that women's influence was not merely a fabrication of the literature of what has come to be termed the "cult of domesticity" but was a reality within many nineteenth-century homes.

Marilyn Ferris Motz

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